A Sermon Based Upon 1 John 4: 7-21, NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
5th Sunday of Easter, April 29,
2018
(4-6)
Sermon Series: 1 John
The
Odyssey, by the ancient Greek poet
Homer, is one of the most enduring classics. It is a story about human heroes who must to
stand up against vindictive, petty, deceitful gods.
The gods are very deceitful. They play
favorites. They make a sport out of interfering in human lives. The goddess, Calypso, keeps the poor hero Odysseus, prisoner on her island, far
from Ithaca, far from his wife and his son, because she wants him as her own. Poseidon,
the God of the seas, also keeps Odysseus from making it home, inflicting
disaster after disaster on him and his men. And while the goddess Athena is Odysseus' champion, on
Olympus, the gods compete with each other, using poor Odysseus as a pawn in
their power struggles with one another.
It is no wonder that the Greek
philosopher Socrates did not encourage his students to read these stories. He
thought that the gods in Greek poetry were immoral and unworthy of respect.
Like many, he gave the gods their due, probably observed the public rituals,
but after that he left the gods alone.
This negative, view of the gods was
fairly common in the ancient world. Once
you had offered the appropriate sacrifices, avoided violating sacred places, and
did no harm to priests, you could avoid drawing attention to yourself. You surely didn’t want to get to close to the
gods, or let the gods become too involved with you. If you
did, then any ‘glory’ won would be offset by a greater measure of suffering
you’d have to go through. Getting
involved with the gods was dangerous and to be avoided.
Interestingly, even though these were ‘mythical
views, they made a valid point about life: Given the fickle nature of glory and of
fortune in this life, who wants to go after ‘glory’ or ‘accomplish something’
when it means that the ‘gods’ are out to get you?
Why would we view the gods as anything
but capricious and erratic?
LOVE
IS FROM GOD…. (7).
This negative, skeptical and pessimism was
how the majority identified the difficulties and unpredictability of life. Are we any different? Doesn’t a spirit of skepticism and pessimism
also dominate our day? Don’t we preach
and live ‘without authority?’ People seem
to be skeptical of politics, of institutions, of establishments, of religion,
and most every other kind of truth claim or authority, except, of course, their
own. And when we see what’s on the news,
what’s happening in politics, or even who’s preaching on TV, can you blame
them? Can you blame people for feeling
so morally hopeless, and from distancing themselves from any kind of truth,
authority, or even from faith?
Several years ago, when I was pastor of
a church in Greensboro, a lady made an appointment to see me. She was not a member of our congregation, but
she came and asked if I would perform her wedding ceremony. I asked her, whether or not she was a
Christian, and or a member of another church.
She answered that she was a faithful member of another Baptist Church in
the area. “Why don’t you want to get
married in your church?”, I asked. She then went on to tell me that her pastor
would not marry her, because she wanted her bridesmaids were going to have
dresses on that were sleeveless, and the pastor would not allow that in his
sanctuary.
Upon hearing her reason for wanting to
use our sanctuary, and why she wanted me to perform the ceremony, I gave her
this advice: “Ma’am, I’d be honored to perform your wedding ceremony in our
church, but before we make this final, let me make a request. You go back and tell your pastor that I’m
willing to perform the ceremony, and if I do that that you, and all your family
will join this church. If you go and
tell your pastor this, I’m guessing he might make an exception for your
‘sleeveless dresses’.” She agreed, and
she never came back. Evidently, her
pastor decided to perform the ceremony.
You know, on the face of it, people may
be keeping their ‘distance’ from us too, because churches can also be ‘fickle’.
Many are living their lives this way
today. People come to churches asking for funerals,
weddings, and some even want to be baptized.
They want to "do the right
thing," to offer some kind of appropriate religious respect, but they also
keep a careful distance. They do not
want to get too involved. As evangelist
Billy Graham used to say, ‘People have just enough religion to
inoculate them from the real thing.” They want God at crucial moments in
their lives or for their children, but they are wary of greater exposure or
real commitment. They seem to be
playing it safe, doing what is expected, following convention--but no more.
And in this way, some people today are
acting just like the ancient pagans. After
all, good, upright pagans were never anti-religious. They accepted the gods as
offered by their culture. They paid those gods their due respect--to get a
blessing or to ward off harm. Like the
ancient pagans, many today want to have a little religion at important times,
but they also resist allowing God any greater claim on their lives. Perhaps
they do not see why God deserves any greater commitment. Perhaps they are
afraid and wish not to draw attention to themselves by being either too
religious or not religious enough. And, perhaps, as is most likely, they just
don't see what God has to do with themselves, with their lives.
When it comes to how to address the
complacency many have toward church, you wonder why they bother at all. On the other hand, it is sometimes through a funeral,
a wedding, or a child dedication when people discover that churches have value
and that God is not distant or fickle, but near, present. Perhaps they will also learn that God does care
for our lives and that a relationship with God is not vengeful but gentle, warm
and gracious. The question is how do we get people to move closer and to ‘test the spirits’ as John says, before
today’s text.
Perhaps John is on to something
universal in humanity and spiritual when he writes about the need to reduce all
religious and spirituality down to love. After John names the Christian ‘spirit’
as the ‘spirit that confesses that Jesus
Christ has come in the flesh’ (4:2), John has no doubt what naming Jesus as Lord should
mean in the Church: “Beloved, let us love on another, because love is from God; everyone
who loves is born of God and knows God.
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (7-8).
IF
WE LOVE….GOD LIVES IN US (12).
Let’s not make our religion or our faith
any more complicated than it should be. Let
us make sure that the main thing remains the main thing. ‘If we love,’ John says, ‘’God
lives in us.’ This is true he says,
because ‘God is Love’. Here, John shows us, reminds us, even
admonishes about what it means to take faith in Christ seriously in any
generation or in every church. To take faith seriously is to take loving each
other seriously. Without this, we have no Christian faith or no Christian
Church.
Perhaps, when things are going all right
for ourselves, we forget that showing love is what the church is about. We might also forget that knowing that love
is our main message is not obvious to everybody, because we sometimes forget it
too. To proclaim that "God is love" is counter-intuitive.
To believe that God is love is to commit
ourselves to a counter-cultural, even a radical confession, or it is pure
stupidity or mad fantasy. It is one or the other. There is no middle ground
here. Either we are bearers of a new truth about God and the world, or we are above
all to be pitied as the greatest of fools.
That is the way of the Gospel. We are
bearers of the message that God is for you, God is with you, God cares for you,
and, yes, God loves you. This message should strike us--and does strike pagans
both ancient and modern--as a message so good as to border on the absurd and
ridiculous. But for Jesus Christ, in this Gospel, God’s
gospel, God brought divine love to our common human experience, not to trick
us, not to make sport of us, not even to judge us or condemn us, but to join
with us, to live fully in our common human experience, to be born, to live, to
suffer, to die, all out of love--and to rise again to show that nothing, not
even death, can extinguish this love. This is our hope, our calling, and our
mission, that ‘nothing can separate us from God’s Love, unless we refuse it (These ideas from Stephen Carlsen, 2012).
WE
LOVE BECAUSE HE FIRST LOVED US (19)
So, can you now see how pagans, both
ancient and modern, do get something right about faith after all? To get involved with God makes a claim on
your life. When we join up with God in
love, we become vulnerable not because God is mean, vindictive, or out to get
us, but because in God we must open ourselves up to love and be loved.
Our epistle says simple and plain: “We Love because God first loved us.” Our mission as Christians is to lift up love
because we know love. Now revealed in
Jesus Christ—is to see all love as an echo of the love of God, to name all love
as God's, and to be drawn to this love and to reflect it for each other and for
the world (Stephen Carlsen).
Everything John is saying goes back to his
most revolutionary statement: "God is love". By this John does is not mean that God is sentimental, easy, or
frivolous. No, this is a bold confession
of faith, so radical that it sounds stupid to people who are so full of the
world they can’t understand anything but hate.
But in this ‘hateful’ world to acknowledge such truth demands a bold
commitment and faith. And how will anyone believe this about our faith, unless
they see it among us? How will anyone be convinced that beneath the pain and
suffering of common experience flows divine love--how will anyone know unless
we live that way?
Having been loved by God, we likewise
must love, and not just to love those closest to us or those who are easiest to
love; our love must extend to places and to people where love is foreign, where
love is absent, where faith in love has faded or died. To be loved by God is to be
given a mission: mimicking Star Trek logic here, ‘to take this bold faith in love where love hasn’t gone before’; to
those who just cannot accept it, to the destitute, the broken, to those who
have lost hope, and not just to tell them this improbable truth, but to show
them it is true, through our lives and actions. No one will believe it unless they see it in
us.
Maxie Dunam tells of having a beautiful
carving of the hands of Jesus held together in prayer on his desk. On the base
of the carving, there is an inscription based on Hebrews 7:25, which says, “The
hands of the carpenter, Jesus, intercedes for us.” Those craved, praying hands were a gift from
Jeannine Brabon, a missionary in Medellin, Colombia. One of her primary ministries is within a
prison, Bellavista, one of the worst prisons in Colombia. That prison was built
to hold 1500 – the inmates now number over 5,000. It has been one of the worst
prisons in Columbia, holding many of the most dangerous criminals in that
country. That prison has been a hotbed
of drugs, killings, suicides, and homosexual rape – the worst, most oppressive
kind of existence. Inmates would have their throats slashed and laid out in the
courtyard. Awful, awful unimaginable things were going on. The heads of inmates
would be cut off and kicked about in the exercise yard as though these heads
were soccer balls.
But something happened in that prison several
years ago. About 5% of the population has become Christian – and transformation
has taken place. There is a sense in which it is presently a place of peace. Interestingly,
the person who carved the hands of Jesus, which was given as a gift, was an
inmate in that prison. His name was Carlos
Velasquez. He carved the praying hands of Jesus from a cedar tree that had
been struck by lightning. When you look at those praying hands on the left
hand, you can see the black streak going up the hand and along the fingers –
the black streak left by the lightning.
In a note that accompanied the gift of
the praying hands, the missionary working in the prison wrote: “There is nothing struck by disaster or
devastated by sin that cannot be transformed by the Master’s hands.” Then she
added, “The hands that carved these
praying hands once processed cocaine for one of Columbia’s big drug lords.”
Praise God! – For with God, nothing is
impossible.
Now that is a powerful story within
itself , but the story goes on. This
man, Carlos Velasquez who was
converted in prison has been released and is now preaching the gospel. Here is a
portion of a letter that missionary Jeannine Brabon wrote about Carlos: “On a bright Sunday I found myself “ten
minutes away from hell.” But Carlos Velasquez came to make an eternal
difference. Many know Carlos, an ex-prisoner, through his gifted woodcarvings.
Released from prison four years ago, he has in the past year raised up a church
in one of the most violent areas of Medellin. Three other churches have tried
evangelizing the area, but the danger drove them away. In obedience to the call
of God upon his life and with the support of his wife, Aleida, Carlos moved
their family of six to dwell among the people of this barrio (suburb).
One night at four a.m., they were
awakened by screams of anguish. They went to their bedroom window, only to
witness the vivid drama of a 16-year-old slowly being murdered by gunfire in
front of his family. How would you
expect Carlos’s wife to respond? “Honey, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t
risk our lives and the lives of our children this way. What can we do in this
hellish place, anyway?” That kind of response would have been normal. But
With tears Aleida responded, “Oh honey,
we have got to be more urgent in sharing Jesus. We have got to reach them and
tell about Jesus before they die, and it’s too late.”
Carlos, amazed at this wife’s courage in
the midst of evil, was strengthened to continue in the battle. . . “We desire
to be found faithful with whatever He entrusts to us,” he says. Carlos and Aleida are following Jesus in this fashion
not because they loved God first, but because this God who is love, ‘first loved’ them. It is this kind of love that can still ‘cast out all fear’. (Story told by Maxie Dunam, in a sermon, “Why Being a
Christian Has Worn You Down?),.”
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