A Sermon Based Upon 1 John 3: 16-24, NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
4th Sunday of Easter, April 22,
2018
(3-6)
Sermon Series: 1 John
Israeli historian Yuval Harari’s
suggests that traditional Christianity will soon cease to be. His logic is based on the fact most Christians
today use the Bible for authority rather than inspiration. Since the Bible, in a scientific world has
no realistic authority, it won’t be long, he says, until Christianity dies for
lack of inspiration (lefthttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/yuval-noah-hararis-dystopia/.
While we may not like what Harari says, he
makes a valid point. It’s not about
whether or not the Bible has any authority, but it’s about whether the Bible’s
authority inspires us to live differently than anyone else. What
kills the Christian Faith more than anything else, is when we say that we believe
the Bible’s message, but then merely put it back on the shelf and do nothing.
Interestingly, a complacent faith is not
a new challenge to the Christian Faith.
Back at the beginning of the modern age, in the 18th century,
the great Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard already believed that traditional
Christianity was dead unless it turned its energy into ‘works of love’. “The
Bible is very easy to understand”, he said. “But we
Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to
understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are
obliged to act accordingly” (From Provocations).
What we see in our text today is that
the challenge to have an active, realistic, loving faith goes all the way back
to the very first days of the church. This
is not so much a ‘faith’ problem, as it is, as John puts it, a ‘sin’ problem (3:7ff). The major concern of John’s first letter is
about whether or not the ‘commandment’
of love from Jesus (2:8ff) is being practiced and lived in the church. John’s asks whether or not people in the
church actually display love for one another.
His point for the church’s mission should be clear: Unless we
are a loving community among ourselves, we won’t have any mission impact on the
world.
…LAY
DOWN OUR LIVES FOR ONE ANOTHER (16)
In our text John doesn’t mess around
with getting to his point: “You will
know love by this” (16). In other
words, this is what Christian love looks like.
This is the kind of ‘love’ that builds the community of Christ. Strangely, John is actually saying that a Christian
community only lives, when it is willing to die. Only when we are ready to ‘lay down our lives’ for the sake of
showing love to each other, can we rightly call ourselves ‘Christian’ (3:16).
One historian, writing about how Christianity
grew so rapidly from obscurity to become the dominate faith of the Roman
empires, proved that it was because Christianity ‘cared’ and was willing to
risk death to show genuine love. It was
during a time of ‘black death’ or ‘the plague’, as others, including doctors
were scrambling to get away, Christians dared to stay and care, without fear of
losing their own lives. They were
literally prepared to ‘lay down their lives’ and this made their lives a witness
to the gospel truth of Christ’s love
(Rodney Stark).
Of course, normally, we understand ‘laying
down your life’ in most dramatic terms, like soldiers falling on a hand grenade
for a comrade, but what about the same kind of sacrificial love also in less
dramatic terms? What about the simple
terms of one person taking time to be with another, to give care to another, to
write a card, or to keep in touch with another? Christian love can be dramatic, but in most
cases real Christianity can be reduced to taking another person seriously,
sincerely, and genuinely. Why should we
do that?
The reason we should be ready to follow
Christ’s example of loving sacrifice, is that it is the sacrifice of love that
gives life its meaning. We all need to
live for something. The best way to
determine what this something should be is to answer what we would be willing
to die for. We are all going to die, so what matters is that before we die, we
live for something so that we die after living for something that matters and
gives life meaning. Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, was the
first to analyze why some people were able to survive during one of the worst moments
of world history, and others, who should have survived didn’t. What
made the difference was living with ‘meaning’, or having a ‘purpose’ or ‘reason’
to survive. “Woe, to the person sees no aim, purpose or
carrying on. He or she will soon be lost.” (From
the Search for Meaning).
Of course, being Christian doesn’t mean
we actually have to physically die, but genuine love finds meaning in life
because it is always sacrificial. As
Jesus told his disciples, ‘There is no
greater love, than to give your life for your friends.’ In our own lives this translates to bearing
the cross to love one another. John says
we ‘know that we have passed from death
into life, because we love one another’ (3:14). To love one another is what it means to be ‘born of God’ and to live above human
sin.
….
IN TRUTH AND ACTION (18)
John goes on to define loving, sacrificial
love as not simply ‘word or speech’
but as ‘truth and action’ (18). Perhaps we might also translate love as
being ‘truth in action’. When the ‘truth’ we ‘believe in the
name of Jesus’ (v.23) becomes the ‘action’
of how we live with each other, then we know that “God’s love abides in us” (17).
Love can’t be truth without
action.
A little girl was invited for dinner at
the home of her first-grade friend. The vegetable was buttered broccoli and the
mother asked if she liked it. “Oh, yes,” the child replied politely, “I love
it!” But when the bowl of broccoli was
passed, she declined to take any. The hostess said, “I thought you said you
loved broccoli.” The girl replied sweetly, “Oh, yes ma’am, I do, but not enough
to eat it!”
Do we love enough to act upon that love?
This is the message John keeps
repeating over and over in this short letter. If God’s love is in us, it is not just ‘speech’
or talk, but ‘truth and action’ (18). And before that, John has told his
congregation exactly what an ‘act of love’ looks like. John states the positive with a negative
example: ‘God’s love,’ he says, can’t
abide in anyone who ‘has the world’s
goods and sees a brother or sister in need and refuses to help.’ True love sees a need and responds to
that need. Christian love is made true,
not by ‘words’, but by ‘action’. This
is the kind of ‘love’ John means
when he speaks of ‘God’s love’. It is the kind of love that can’t stand back
and do nothing, but it is the kind of love that acts.
Jesus taught the need for active love in
his unforgettable parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). You will remember how a Lawyer, in response
to Jesus’ command to love your neighbor, asked Jesus ‘Who is my neighbor’? Jesus answered
with the story of the ‘good’ Samaritan, as the person who stopped and acted in
response a human in need. Without turning words about love, or feelings of
love, into real action, Jesus implies, then
there is no ‘truth’ to love.
A couple of years ago, the Atlantic
Magazine, did a study of how some relationships lasted and others didn’t. The answer was simple. The relationships that lasted where those
couples who found ways to turn their feelings of love for each other into
simples gestures of kindness and generosity. That article was based on the findings of a
little book entitled, “The Science of
Happy Ever After”. During the 1970’s marriages
where falling apart, and the reason? People
spent most of their moments in either ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ mode, rather than ‘what
can I do for you mode’. In other studies, social scientists were able to separate
different kinds of couples either in a ‘masters’ group, or a ‘disasters’ group. The
difference could be reduced down to the simple ways a couple would try to
connect with each other, by saying something as simple as, “Did you see that bird flying by the window…?”
(https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/).
Several years ago there was a famous
PEANUTS cartoon in which Shroeder, that piano loving intellectual, was
interrupted as he often was by his infatuated admirer, Lucy. Lucy asked
Shroeder, "Shroeder, do you know what love is?" Shroeder
abruptly stopped his playing, stood to his feet and said precisely, "Love: noun, to be fond of, a strong
affection for or an attachment or devotion to a person or persons."
Then he sat back down and resumed playing his piano. Lucy
sat there stunned and then murmured sarcastically, "On paper, he's
great."
The point that Science makes, which Lucy
of Peanuts makes, is also the point that Scripture has always made: “If I
do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13: 2ff). And what Paul meant when he wrote those
words, is not simply having love, but doing love. He goes on to insist how love must be turned
into daily actions. “Love is patient… Love is Kind… Love is not envious… Love does not insist on its own way. Love bears, believes, hopes, and
endures… Love never ends.. Love is the
greatest. Pursue Love…. (1 Cor. 13:
4-13, 14:1f). And always, the greatest
way to ‘pursue’ love, is to ‘do’ love, as John says, not just in ‘word or speech’, or on paper, but ‘in truth and action’ (1 John 3:18).
…IF
OUR HEARTS DO NOT CONDEMN US (21)
But how do we determine the ‘truth’ or ‘action’
of love that is needed? John goes on to say that discerning the right
kind of loving ‘action’ can be as
simple as ‘following our heart’. This
is what John explains next, when he says, ‘we
will know that we are from the truth (or of the truth) and will reassure our hearts whenever our hearts condemn us…..”
(19-20).
This sounds negative, but it’s not meant
that way. What John is saying is that
since God’s word of truth is in us, if we see someone in need, and do nothing,
our hearts convict us of what how we are
not responding, and convince us of how
we should respond to a brother or sister in need. Think of that Homeless man from North
Carolina who was on the news last Thanksgiving. He was down on his luck and homeless in a
large city, when he saw a woman in need on a dark road. He told her to stay in her car while he took
her gas can and used his last 20 dollars to buy her some gas.
To thank the homeless man for his
generosity, the woman and her husband
put up a ‘Go Fund Me Page’ to raise 10 thousand dollars. Just a few days later, they had over 300 thousand dollars of pledges. What this story reminds us is that all of
us, already know what true, loving action means. Again, as Kierkegaard said, “The truth in the Bible is very easy to
understand’, if, that is, we want to understand it.”
When John speaks of our ‘hearts’ being ‘reassured’ and not being ‘condemned’, he is not merely speaking
of the individual heart, but following the ‘heart’ that that is shaped by the community
where we live to learn how to love.
When we live in loving, caring, compassionate relationship with others,
our hearts are shaped by that community and our love is sharpened to love, even
beyond that community, so that love grows and flourishes, even in an unloving
world.
…
BY THE SPIRIT THAT HE HAS GIVEN US (24)
This kind of loving community in Christ gets
its ‘inspiration’ not simply from what
the community or the crowd wants, but John says here, that this a community
that is ‘inspired’ by it’s ‘belief in…Jesus (23), and obeys ‘his commandments’ so that by ‘abiding
in him” we reveal that ‘he abides in
us’ (v.24).
Here, at the end of this text, we have
come full circle. Here, we find the answer to the question of whether
or not Christianity has a future. John
reminded his readers long ago, that the Church only has a future if the authority
of the Bible inspires us to act in
loving ways toward each other. This is
what John means as he concludes by referring to the ‘Spirit that he has given us’ (v. 24). The ‘loving ways’ we are to show each other are
not ways only based on our own interpretations of what love is or what love
means, but the love we show and share is love that is based ‘his commandments’ and upon our ‘abiding in him’ and ‘him abiding in us’.
Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese man, became
a Christian as a teenager. It cost him dearly to love the Lord, because his
family disinherited him. They did not want a Christian in their traditional
Japanese family. Yet, Kagawa persevered in his newfound faith.
After years of study in Tokyo, he
returned to his hometown of Kobe. He was concerned for the poor of Kobe, so he
lived in a six-foot by six-foot hut in one of the worst slums in the world. He
worked to establish the first labor union in Japan among shipyard workers. He
also founded the Farmer's Union. His efforts did not always meet with the
approval of the authorities. Twice he was arrested because of his efforts on
behalf of the working people. His ‘abiding’ faith in led him to see the face of
God in the faces of the poor and oppressed people of Japan. He established credit unions, schools,
hospitals, and churches throughout Japan on their behalf.
In one of his writings, Kagawa expressed
this: "My real experience of
religion came when I entered the Kobe slums. Everything in the slums was ugly:
the people, the houses, the clothes, the streets -- everything was ugly and
full of disease. If I had not carried God beside me, I should not have been
able to stay. But because I believed in
God ... I had a different view of life ... My job was to help these people ...
A gambler, dying, said to me that he was going back to his Heavenly Father.
Then for the first time, like a flash, I was convinced that any person, even
the most depraved, is able to grasp the God’s love when it is shown in action.
(From Toyohiko
Kagawa, Love: The Law Of Life), pp. 13-14.
A community of faith who ‘abides in him’, obeys ‘his commandments’, and ‘loves
one another’ will continue to
thrive, and survive, because the more we live and love like this, the more
people can ‘know’ God’s love and we
will know that his ‘eternal life’ is
abiding in us (15). Amen.
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