Project: 1 John 3:1-7
Third Sunday of Easter
See what kind of love the Father has given to us in
that we should be called God’s children, and that is what we are! Because the
world didn’t recognize him, it doesn’t recognize us.
2 Dear friends, now we
are God’s children, and it hasn’t yet appeared what we will be. We know that
when he appears we will be like him because we’ll see him as he is. 3 And
all who have this hope in him purify themselves even as he is pure. 4 Every person who practices sin commits an act of rebellion,
and sin is rebellion. 5 You know that he
appeared to take away sins, and there is no sin in him. 6 Every
person who remains in relationship to him does not sin. Any person who sins has
not seen him or known him.
7 Little children, make sure no one deceives you. The person who practices righteousness is righteous, in the same way that Jesus is righteous. (CEB)
The preacher Fred Craddock tells a
story about meeting an elderly man at a restaurant near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The man discovered Craddock was a minister
and sat down him to tell him that he owed rather a lot to a minister himself; he
had grown up in the mountains of Tennessee without any knowledge of who his
father was at a time when that was a source of deep shame. “When I went into town with [my mother],” the
man told Craddock, “I could see people staring at me, making guesses as to who
was my father. At school the children
said ugly things to me, and so I stayed to myself during recess, and I ate my
lunch alone. In my early teens I began
to attend a little church back in the mountains called Laurel Springs Christian
Church. It had a minister who was both attractive and frightening. He had a chiseled face and a heavy beard and
a deep voice. I went to hear him
preach. I don’t know exactly why, but it
did something for me. However, I was
afraid that I was not welcome since I was, as they put it, a bastard. So I would go just in time for the sermon,
and when it was over I would move out because I was afraid that someone would
say, ‘What’s a boy like you doing in a church?’
“One Sunday
some people queued up in the aisle before I could get out, and I was
stopped. Before I could make my way
through the group, I felt a hand on my shoulder, a heavy hand. It was that minister…I trembled in fear. He turned his face around so he could see
mine and seemed to be staring for a little while. I knew what he was doing. He was going to make a guess as to who my
father was. A moment later he said, ‘Well,
boy, you’re a child of…’ and he paused there.
And I knew it was coming. I knew
I would have my feelings hurt. I knew I
would not go back again. He said, ‘Boy,
you’re a child of God. I see a striking
resemblance…Now, you go claim your inheritance.’ I left the building a different person. In fact, that was really the beginning of my
life.”
Stunned,
Craddock asked the man’s name. “Ben
Hooper,” he said—the same Ben Hooper who had been twice elected as governor of
Tennessee in the nineteen-teens.[1]
“See what kind
of love…that we should be called God’s children!” proclaims the author of this
sermon of 1 John. The idea of God as
parent can be difficult for those who have strained relations with their own families,
but it is woven deep into the language of Who God is. It’s important for us to understand that God
as parent meant something specific in these writings; God the Father isn’t
someone Who teaches us how to catch a baseball or yells at us when we come in
late from a night out. God the Father is
the anchor in an uncertain world that gives us a name, a place, a direction for
who we are to become. “In the Roman
world adoptions took place, but it was not about compassion for orphans,”
explains Professor Nijay Gupta. “In
fact, many people were adopted as young adults or adults. Adoption was
about inheritance and name. Often a man was
adopted to carry on the name of a childless family. The adopted son would sever
ties to the old family and this would include relief of any debt owed under the
name of the old family. He would become a whole new person, in a new context,
with a new inheritance and name.”[2]
“So if anyone
is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see,
everything has become new!”[3] Paul writes in his second
letter to the Corinthians. To be adopted into the family of God, to become
God’s child, is to be reoriented in the world to such a degree that we take on
a family resemblance to One Whom we’ve never even seen. “We know that when he appears, we’ll be like
him!”
It’s a nice
thought, to be remade into the very image and lineage of the Holy. But we’re not doing a great job with
that. There’s a quote, variously
attributed to Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Mark Twain, and Voltaire, that runs, “God
made man in His own image. Man, being a
gentleman, returned the favor.” Gendered
though it is, the idea that we humans often shape God into our image and
our lineage is true; we project onto God all the things we have decided
God is. We here in the United States
call ourselves a Christian nation and encourage our politicians to end all
their speeches with “God bless the United States of America” and we have the
leading numbers of COVID in the world, some 18 million children living in food
insecure homes,[4]
more than half a million people experiencing homelessness—that we know of,[5] and on Thursday alone we
had four mass shootings.[6]
Four.
The news can’t
even cover all of them anymore. The news
also can’t keep up with police violence, as Matthew Williams, Daunte Wright,
and Adam Toledo in this week alone joined the murals of names of Black people
killed by officers.
Is this what
God looks like, this endless round of the uncertain and the grieving? Is this the hope we have in God, that at
least we aren’t dead on the evening news?
Is it faithful to claim God’s name and inheritance if we hear these
stories and say oh if only they worked harder, if only they’d listen to the
law, if only there had been a good guy with a gun?
No.
And
I can categorically say no because of this text, right here, on this third
Sunday of a season intended to celebrate resurrection, the triumph of life over
death, the certainty that God has not abandoned and will not abandon us to the
hopelessness of injustice. This text
calls out that projection of our image onto God, that erasure of others in
favor of our way of understanding, and calls it sin, flat out.
Sin
is not a word we use lightly in church because it has been a brutal weapon
against so many. I was recently reminded
that my great-grandfather was a preacher, too, and loved himself a good
fire-and-brimstone barnburner of a sermon that would shiver people off the path
to Hell and into righteousness by telling them of the weight of their sin that
was dragging them down. It’s a good
scare tactic, to bury someone in the guilt and shame of their sin so that they
will do anything to avoid eternal damnation.
It’s what takes kids like Ben Hooper and heaps the coals of their
ancestors on them to make them feel less, feel inhuman for having dared to be
connected to sin. It’s what we might be
tempted to get out of verse six here, that any person who sins has not seen God
or known God. What a terrible thought,
that we who have sinned—and don’t try to tell me, anyone who is listening to
this, that you are free from sin at all times and in all places because there
is only One Who managed that feat and you are, I’d wager, not Him—cannot have
known God.
But
this is not a gotcha text in which hope is extended and yanked back so
that we choke on brimstone. I am not interested
in scaring you into Heaven. This sermon
of 1 John does not say that the kind of love the Father has given us is that He
doesn’t strike us down where we stand; “see what kind of love the Father
has given to us in that we should be called God’s children”. Love!
It is love that God offers us, love that is our
inheritance, love that tears down our projections of Who we think God
should be and replaces them with Who God is and ever shall be.
Love,
however, is not the Valentine’s Day candy heart kind of sappiness that requires
only googly eyes. We are to “purify
ourselves” even as Christ was pure.
There is sin, and “every person who practices sin commits an act of
rebellion, and sin is rebellion,” the author writes. There is no flinching there, no equivocation. Sin is rebellion, “the action or process of
resisting authority, control, or convention.”[7] Rebellion against whom? Against the God Whose children we are
supposed to be, the God Who offered us love.
And what does it take to love?
“When he came to Nazareth, where he
had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his
custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of
the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place
where it was written:
18 ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it
back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed
on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, ‘Today
this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”[8]
This
is Jesus’ first sermon in Luke, and it nearly gets Him thrown off a cliff. It is always unpopular to talk about
redistributing power, but Christians, we are not and have never been called to
be popular. We are called to be
the children of God who bear good news, the gospel. If the good news doesn’t free the oppressed
or release the captives, it’s not good news.
If the good news doesn’t speak out against injustice, it’s not good
news. If the good news is mired in a
projection of a God Who looks exactly like me and never like you, it’s not good
news. It’s rebellion, and those who
rebel have not really seen the Christ Who brings us to the Father.
Scott
Hoezee writes it like this: “C.S. Lewis once wrote that too often we think that
what sanctification is all about is sort of like taking a horse and training it
to run a little faster than it used to run. In actuality, Lewis noted,
what happens to us as believers once we become engrafted onto Christ is not
like taking a regular old horse and teaching it to run faster but more like
taking a horse, outfitting it with a pair of wings, and teaching the creature
to FLY! The saved life in Christ is not just any old life made a little
bigger or brighter or some such thing. It is to take a human life and
transform it into a whole new mode of existence.
“Or
as theologian Laura Smit once put it…‘goodness’ in God is not just human
goodness magnified but is of a different quality altogether. Thus, if we
are to share in God’s goodness—if we are to bear the Fruit of the Spirit of
goodness a la Galatians 5—then it means having something quite new move into
our lives from God’s side of things.
“…So
if you keep abusing people, keep hurting people, keep hating people, keep
committing adultery or stealing or lying or any number of things and have no
desire either to stop such activity much less confess it as wrong, well then,
that’s not a mistake. It’s a different world altogether that has nothing
to do with being children of the heavenly Father.”[9]
This
kind of love is recognizing that who we were before cannot be who we are always
going to be. It’s time to step into the
family resemblance, Church; it’s time to claim that inheritance. It’s time, here and now and also tomorrow,
again, and all our days to take on the hope the purifies. Following God like a parent is taking on God’s
projection, God Who remakes us, Who guides us, Who gives us a new name and a
direction to go and make the world a place where, one day, there will be no
more tears of sorrow, where the lion will lie down with the lamb, where Black
lives truly matter and children do not have to practice active shooter drills
in between learning the alphabet, where the hungry are fed and the poor are
recognized as human beings without having to earn compassion.
I’m
down. I want to follow that God, I want
to be made in that image, I want to help create that kind of place.
Want
to join me, Church? Want to show me what
you are already doing, you who bear a “striking resemblance” to the God Who
claims you? It’s hard work, and constant
work, this bringing about of the year of the Lord’s favor. It involves not turning away from violence
because it makes you uncomfortable to think about racial differences; it
involves educating ourselves on the vast sickness of white supremacy and how
many things it corrupts; it involves listening to people who are of a different
color, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, nationality, and
hearing how their experiences differ from ours and how their concerns come from
familiarity; it involves getting involved by donating to food pantries and
voting and wearing a mask in public spaces and getting vaccinated and catching
ourselves when we see a shooting or arrest and start to say “well if that
person had only—“. It involves learning
how to practice righteousness, which involves studying what righteousness even
is; read Scripture, get into small group discussions, ask me questions, talk to
people who have lived long and deep into a life of faith. We are constantly living into the family
resemblance to God, one choice between righteousness and rebellion at a
time. Rejoice, for each moment is an
invitation to be made whole in the very good news of a God Who loves us fully,
completely, deeply.
May
we have the strength to keep learning, the faith to keep going, and the heart
to keep loving this parent God Who calls us family in the best possible sense
of the term. Amen.
[1]
From Craddock Stories by Fred Craddock (Chalice Press, 2001), pp.
156–57. It’s not entirely true, per 'Who's Your Daddy?'
Ben Hooper Story | Snopes.com and the lack of such a preacher in Hooper’s
autobiography, but it’s charming all the same.
[3]
2 Cor. 5:17, NRSV.
[7]
REBELLION | Definition of
REBELLION by Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com also meaning of REBELLION
[8]
Luke 4:16-21, NRSV.
Comments
Post a Comment