A Sermon Based Upon 1 John 5: 1-9, NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
6th Sunday of Easter, May 6th,
2018
(5-6)
Sermon Series: 1 John
We’ve all heard the warning: “This
show contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is
advised.” When you hear that, that’s
when everybody is going to pay attention.
“Remember what it used to be like
watching Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, David Brinkley and others before dinnertime?
This nightly ritual kept many busy parents "current" with current
events. But for young children and teenagers, the ritual practice of turning on
"the news" was about as interesting as watching paint dry.
White-haired talking heads droning on boringly, endlessly, about who knows what!” “But haven’t you noticed,” asks Leonard
Sweet, “how in the past decade, television news has changed”?
“To keep us tuned in, TV newscasters
have wedded, even welded themselves to a new journalistic adage: "If it bleeds, it leads." Even more,
TV newscasts have focused wide-angle, telephoto, slow-motion, instant-replay
cameras on the violence that mars and scars our lives. "Watching the
news" is now as terrifyingly mesmerizing for 5-year-olds as it is for
50-year-olds.
Bodies lie splayed out, blood flies and
flows across the TV screen. The "news" has become so grisly and
graphic both in words and in pictures that many communities have clamored for
and received from their local stations specially toned-down
"family-rated" versions of the news that are deemed acceptable for
viewing by young children.
We are a society saturated in blood. In the movies and on the news, in our sports
and on the screen, blood sells. After a hiatus of many years, where the only
books with blood in their titles were books about vampires and witches and
horror mysteries, "blood" has now become a hot buzzword. Even the BBC
television series on microbiology has now become a book called In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny by
Steve Jones. Any-more, unless the
blood really spills and spurts, we're not too impressed. We are as fascinated by the sight of all that
vital red stuff as were our more primitive forebears.”
The close of our text today is about ‘the one who came by water and blood…. (v
6). Many mainline denominational
hymnbooks, due to the violence of our age, tend to omit songs about the ‘blood’,
but the Bible refuses to clean up the ‘messiness’ of God’s redeeming work. In the Bible, God’s love will always be ‘written in red’. How many of you remember those Bibles of your
childhood, where the words of Jesus were called ‘red-letter editions’? In recent years, some are attempting to draw
our attention these ‘red-letter’ portions of the Bible again. In a confusing, complicated world, people
need figure out, all over again, what really matters most.
In our text for today, John concludes with
a reminder of what matters, citing an old formula for testing whether or not
Jesus is the Son of God: ‘This is the
one who came by water and blood…. Not with the water only but with the water
AND THE BLOOD… (v.6). This old ‘faith’ formula represented Christ’s baptism
which was by ‘water and blood’. Jesus’ life and death prove God’s love,
because Jesus not only ‘leads’ but he
also ‘bleeds’.
EVERYONE
WHO BELIEVES…. (1).
Before John spoke about Christ’s ‘blood’, he made a bold statement about
faith: “this is victory that conquers
the world, our faith” (1 Jn. 5:4). Everything
that John means when he speaks about ‘water
and blood’ is to point us to having a faith that believes ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ (v.5). It is only faith in Jesus that gives us ‘victory’ over the world.
The idea of gaining ‘victory’ over the
world (v.4) can sound strange to us, since John has moved straight from
speaking about ‘the love of God’
(v.3) This, however, shouldn’t be
understood as accidental or coincidental, but it is very intentional. With such ‘battlefield’ imagery, we are reminded
once again that God’s love is neither sentimental nor wishy-washy. God’s love is a positive ‘power’ than
conquers the negative of the world around us.
But God’s love doesn’t conquer in the sense of ‘shedding someone else’s
blood,’ love conquers by giving one’s own self, as Jesus gave his life and shed
his own ‘blood’ both to forgive sins and show God’s love.
Last week, we read how John said, “God is love!” This is a true statement, but it is also serious
and demanding. The love that God has
brought to the world in Jesus Christ is more than just the capacity to love,
but it is a love that has the capacity to transform our lives and the lives of
others. This transforming love that
changes us begins as faith in Jesus Christ.
“Everyone who believes that Jesus
is the Christ has been born of God….”
The
reason John combines loving with believing is because love doesn’t mean only what we want it to mean. If God is love, then only God can rightly
define what love means. One of the
major problems in John’s day was that people wanted to say they ‘loved God’ without ‘believing’ in Jesus. But John reminded them, that since Jesus is
living expression of God’s love, we can’t say we know what God’s love means,
without having faith in Jesus. This kind
of ‘belief’ meant more than having a ‘feeling’
about Jesus, but it also meant following and obeying what said and is still
saying through him.
WHEN
WE LOVE…AND OBEY (2)
To love God also means to trust or
believe in Jesus. Believing in Jesus
means that we also obey God as He is revealed in Jesus Christ. As the song says: “There is no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust (believe) and
to obey.” ‘For
the love of God is this,’ John says,
‘that we obey his commandments’ (v.3).
Obeying commandments seems very out
modish in our world doesn’t it? We live
in a world that often thinks that we have passed the need to hang commandments
up on public walls. Who wants to have to
‘obey’ any kind of commandment, even Christ’s commandment of to ‘love one
another’? Who dares say that one set of
commandments are more important than others?
This is the mindset of our world.
Recently, I’ve been recently thinking
about ‘commandments’ again. Especially
in light of all the revelations of sexual misconduct from high-level officials,
prominent people, and even those terrible crimes against children committed by
Catholic priests. When you keep hearing the results of our
‘anything goes’ culture, who still thinks we have, as a society, already moved
beyond the need for rules, requirements, and commandments? Commandments and laws are not the answer to
everything, as they were never intended to be, but they are the beginning of
finding the right answer. Unless a
culture follows rules of behavior, conduct, and has high standards of living
with others, it’s not long until we lose the ability to know what love is. If love is ever reduced only to what we feel,
then it ceases to be love.
How do we know what love is? Let me
give you an example I came across: A
fellow stumbled over the words many times. He'd even practiced in front of a
mirror. But when the time came to speak he stuttered again. For months he had
been dating the same girl. For the past few weeks he had been building up his
courage because he wanted to tell her that he loved her. Those words didn't
come easy for him. They especially didn't come easy because he didn't always
get his words exactly as he wanted them to be.
Maybe something else would work. If
words weren't forthcoming perhaps something else could get the message across.
That night he recalled she had mentioned that her car seemed to be running
poorly. She had often said that she
didn't know a thing about machines. So he picked up the car, took it to a
service station, and had the mechanic look at it. She was right; it needed a
tune-up. He didn't say much about it to her. But when he returned the car to
her apartment she thanked him. Later,
in that same week, he remembered that she had often mentioned the fact that
with all of her work and the demands of her schedule, she didn't have time to
visit her mother as often as she wanted. His work was a little slow that week,
so he decided that he could carve out an hour for a short visit. Again,
when they next met, he didn't say much. But she thanked him for what he had
done.
After two weeks had passed, his words
still stuck in his throat. He still wanted to say that he loved her, but he
couldn't. On Monday evening of the third
week, after all of his practiced sentences and stuttering attempts; after the
automobile tune-up and the afternoon visit with her mother, they went out for
dinner. She appeared to be
uncomfortable, like something was on her mind, but she hadn't yet been able to
muster the right words or to find the courage to say them. Finally the moment came. She told him how much
she appreciated all that he had done. She
went on to say that she had been wanting to tell him something for quite a
while now, but that she'd been afraid to. "You know," she said,
"your care and concern have touched me deeply." She paused, and then
continued. "This must be what it
feels like to be loved. I have known other men who say they love me. But you
are the only one who has acted like this." She paused again. After a
deep breath she continued, "Your
actions have spoken so much more eloquently than anything you could say. Thank
you for your love."
When we love God we follow God’s commands,
but we must never start to think that this is just about following rules, but following
the commands of love is about living for someone, and living to have a relationship of love with someone. Think about it this way: Have you ever had someone ask you if you love
them and responded, "Yes, I love you" only to have them ask,
"Why? What is it about me that
makes you love me?" We'll usually
answer a question like that by coming back with a laundry list. "Well, let's see ... I love you because
you're kind, and you're smart, and you make me laugh, and you have the most
beautiful eyes...." But do you really love someone for any of those
logical reasons? I've come to the conclusion that there is no good reason why
we love the people we do. We just love
them because we love them. Sometimes
it's even their faults that draw us to them the most. We love
because we love.
When you think about it, it’s the same
way with God too. God doesn't love us
because we're in any way worthy of that love. God loves us because loving us is
what God does. God is love.
And since God loves us, just because God
loves, we ought to love God, just because he is God. But what does this mean? What
does it mean to love God and show God that we love Him?
Perhaps the answer comes in a quirky
short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a man named Wakefield. One day,
Wakefield wakes up and decides to take a little break from his wife and home in
London and rents out a room one block over. He doesn't tell his wife, and he
only intends to stay away for a day or two but then the days go on. He watches
his wife from a distance for twenty years, never once letting her know where he
is or even that he is living at all — for twenty years. The story ends when one
day, while Wakefield is out walking down the street, he suddenly decides to
return home and we see him entering the door to his home as if he had never
left.
How many people have a relationship with
God like that, and still call it love? One day we slip away and we think it's
just a short break from the relationship, but the years pass and it's as if
we're watching God from one street over but our lives don't ever connect. By
this, I'm not talking necessarily about people who have strayed away from the
church, because the church and God are not the same thing. I'm talking about
anyone who has removed themselves from the loving, obedient relationship God
offers. It can happen for people in the church as easily as it can for those
outside the church.
I don't know about you, but when I'm in
a loving relationship with someone and that relationship is in balance, I can
feel it. When it's out of whack, I can
feel that, too. I suspect that we know when our relationship is in balance with
God or when it's out of whack.
John tells us that one way to tell is if
following Christ's commandment to love one another as he has loved us becomes ‘burdensome’ (v. 3), or it just comes
naturally. After all, when you're in a
loving relationship with someone, you want what they want, too. If Christ wants us to love one another as he
has loved us, it's what we want, too. It’s shouldn’t be a huge struggle for us;
because when the relationship is right, it's something that we willingly do. We may not be perfect at loving the way Christ
does, but there is no question that we're not resisting it. What Christ wants for us is the same thing we
want for ourselves.
It's tempting to become like Wakefield
and say, "You know, maybe someday
I'll go home. Maybe someday I'll be back in a right relationship with
God." Then the days and the years pass. Of course, Wakefield did go
home in the end. We don't know if his
wife was like the waiting father in the story of the prodigal son or not, but
we do know that that's how our God is. God is waiting for us to come to our
senses and find our way back to him. But
in the meanwhile, how much are we missing? Wakefield missed twenty years of his life
because he was a stubborn old fool.
WHO
IS IT THAT CONQUERS THE WORLD? (5).
When John says that ‘faith overcomes the world’ he means the
specific kind of faith in Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. John also means a faith that obeys and desires
to be living in a relationship with the God who loves us. When you have faith in Jesus, and you live that
faith with obedience to love, the negative pull of the world doesn’t have a
chance to rob you of your life or take your hope from you, whether you live or
you die, your hope and your life is in the Lord.
How many of you know what BASE jumping
is? BASE jumping is the very scary sport of jumping off Buildings, Antennae,
Spans, and Earth objects. If you want to do it more than once, you jump with a
parachute or perhaps a hang glider. Some of you may have seen examples of this
daring sport on television. An example: Austrian
extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner, 30, took a sunrise swan dive off the
outstretched hand of the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
BASE jumpers, who parachute from fixed objects, often run afoul of the law. So
Baumgartner had to smuggle his chute and kit (including the crossbow and steel
cable he used to climb the 100-foot concrete-and-soapstone structure) onto a
train carrying tourists up the 2,300-foot mountain, then scale the statue under
cover of night. "This was real hardcore," said Baumgartner, who
survived the jump and was whisked away in a waiting car. "Now I know why
none of my colleagues have tried this before."
Ray Bradbury once said ... if we listened to our intellect, we'd never love
someone, we'd never have friendship, we'd never go into business because we'd
be so cynical ... But living like that is nonsense. If you really what to live
your life, it’s like getting up the courage to jump off cliffs all the time and
then learning to build your wings on the way down.
Sounds risky, doesn’t it? But isn’t this what John means when he speaks
of conquering the world by our faith? The way to find life is not by building a safe
place to live, but the way to give ourselves to conquering the world by faith
in the one, who will catch us, if we fall.
Isn’t this what John means, when he says
that ‘by faith’ God gives us ‘eternal life’ (1 John 5:11)? What does eternal life look like, in the here
and now, as we live with a ‘faith’ that conquers the world? Let me close with this example:
Two
brothers worked together on the family farm. One was married and had a large
family. The other was single. At the day's end the brothers shared everything
equally, produce and profit. One day the single brother said to himself,
"It's not right that we should share equally the produce and the profit.
I'm alone, and my needs are simple." So each night he took a sack of grain
from his bin and crept across the field between their homes, dumping it into
his brother's bin.
Meanwhile,
the married brother said to himself, "It's not right that we should share
the produce and the profit equally. After all, I'm married, and I have my wife
and children to look after me in years to come. My brother has no one, and no
one to take care of his future." So each night he took a sack of grain and
dumped it into his single brother's bin. Both men were puzzled for years because their
supply of grain never dwindled. Then one dark night the two brothers bumped
into each other. Slowly it dawned on them what was happening. They dropped their
sacks and embraced one another*.
Those brothers overcame the negativity in
the world. Pray that this week you might be led to do some BASE jumping with
Jesus, the out of the ordinary, the thing you can only do by God's power, and
in the process, conquer all the negatives of this world. Amen.
(*Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, A
Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul (Health Communications, Inc.,
1995), p. 37.
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