Protect: 1 John 3:16-24
Fourth Sunday of Easter
16 This
is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And
we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 17 If
anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no
pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? 18 Dear
children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in
truth.
19 This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: 20 If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God 22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. 23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. 24 The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. (NIV)
In 1992, the Christian band DC Talk
released an album called “Free at Last.”
The first track was a catchy hip-hop song called “Luv Is a Verb” whose
chorus goes, “Words come easy but don't mean much / When the words they're
sayin' we can't put trust in / We're talkin' 'bout love in a different light /
And if we all learn to love it would be just right”.[1] There are a great many Scriptures from which
the band could have pulled this idea, but this sermon of 1 John fits neatly;
“let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” Words are easy; words are malleable. Actions,
they say, speak quite loudly.
On Tuesday evening, a jury in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, “convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin on all counts in the
death of George Floyd. On May 25, 2020,
Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds after arresting him
for allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. The jury found Chauvin guilty of
second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He faces up to 75 years in prison and will be
sentenced in two months."[2]
The tension of the last month as this
trial unwound in the Minneapolis courthouse has rippled through the nation;
after all, Floyd’s death last May sparked global outrage and protests calling
for reimagining of the police systems here in the United States. I have marched in multiple cities at multiple
demonstrations, which I say not to point out myself as the premier activist but
to say there have been that many events I could join as the eye of the world
focused on the outrageous numbers of people of color dying on camera at the
hands of police. Even as we waited for
the verdict of this death filmed in its entirety by Darnella Frazier on her
cell phone while Floyd wept and struggled to breathe, police in Columbus, Ohio
shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant.[3] On Wednesday morning, deputies in Elizabeth
City, North Carolina, shot and killed Andrew Brown, Jr.[4]
These are the deaths that have made
the headlines. There are, no doubt,
others whose names we do not write into our murals of the dead.
Yes, this is going to be that kind of
sermon.
Of course it is! Of course this is going to be that kind of
sermon because 1 John is that kind of sermon, the sermon that takes headlines
into the pulpit because we as people of faith live from our Scripture into the
world. There was no CNN, no NPR for the
writer of 1 John, but these five chapters of this New Testament book are
absolutely dealing with the reality of living in community. “This is how we know what love is,”
says the preacher; we, together, we who impact each other, we who are trying to
learn each other’s names, we who share a common faith in a God Who commands us
to love one another. Professor Sherri
Brown writes that, “the Letters are best understood as arising from the
community after the crisis with post-war Judaism…and focusing upon the life and
belief of the community itself at the turn of/early in the second century. The
Gospel [of John] was likely written circa 90-100 CE in a community defining
itself in the Greco-Roman world that includes the mainstream Judaism of its
past. The Letters then come from the following decade, circa 100-110 CE, in a
community of churches that now finds it necessary to define itself against
turmoil from within. Christian ideals are proving difficult to live
out in the larger Greco-Roman world that maintains a variety of beliefs and
standards. Writing from an authoritative position, the author seeks to stem the
tide of discord and dissolution and strengthen and unify his communities.”[5]
Tides of discord and
dissolution? A need to define the
community of churches against internal turmoil?
That doesn’t sound familiar at all to us here in the 21st
century.
It is precisely because we know this
place, because it is familiar, that this sermon of 1 John calls us to take a
hard look at how we are living in a world that has so many unloving
places. “This is how we know what love
is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”
We are told to do the same, but the preacher is not talking about
walking in front of a train or getting crucified for somebody else. Love is a verb, yes, but not an automatic
death sentence. The Greek for this is
that Jesus “etheken” [6]
His “psuke,”[7]
the word from which we get “psyche,” the mind; He put or laid aside[8] His soul-force, His
breath. This is how we know what love
is; that Jesus Christ placed His self to one side in order to be fully
present with us.
If anyone sees a sibling in need and asserts
their self at the other’s cost, how can the love of God be in them? We are to set aside our soul-force for each
other—not to the exclusion of ourselves forever in a permanent, living
martyrdom, no. But if there is a need
and we can in some measure help, this is how we know what love is. If there is a man weeping as he dies under
another’s knee and we look away, it is not love. If there is a teenager seeking to protect
herself and we speak of her death as her own fault, it is not love. If a man is shot in the back and we speak of
how he must have been running, it is not love.
If we hear the plea for Black lives to matter and dismiss it with our fearful
insistence that all lives matter, it is not love. If we see another name of a person of color
dying at the hands of the police under unjustly extreme force and say that they
deserved it for fighting back, it is not love.
If we have material possessions to spare and turn from a sibling in
need; if we have privilege in social settings but only talk about how we are
maligned; if we have platforms from which to speak about injustice but hold our
tongues for fear of becoming that person with that sermon, oh,
Church, there is no love of God in us.
How do we know what to do, then? How can we possibly keep up with the sheer
weight of injustice in the world? Surely
that’s God’s job.
It is God’s purview, but it is our
job. There are two things we need to
keep in mind as we seek to show the love of God we have learned. First, we connect to what God asks of us and
check in with what we can do. “Dear
friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God.” Is my heart tugging me toward an action and I
am resisting? It will condemn me for it
later. Is my heart aware of God’s call
to speak but I remain silent? I will
answer for it.
The sermon last week was about the
way in which we are grafted onto God’s family tree and how such a thing
necessarily changes us; this is the result of that change. We are remade, over time, to hear the
whisper—and sometimes the shout—of the Spirit as She moves through the world in
justice and mercy, as She lives in us, abides in us. We anchor ourselves in texts like this one
that remind us of how we know what love looks like, of how we know what is
commanded of us. We listen to
sermons—not just mine—that unpack these texts and apply them, and then we
wrestle with what the unpacking reveals and whether or not that works with the
God we meet in our daily lives. Our
hearts become barometers for the work of the Kingdom among us, and we learn to
read the meter.
Second, we do not do this alone. Let me rephrase that: justice is not an
isolated action. No one person can
change the world; even Jesus had at least twelve friends and then a movement of
billions. The injustice of the world is
not something that you, or that I, can fix by ourselves. So we come together—right now, that’s
virtually, because just as much as we protect our siblings who cannot fight on
their own, we protect each other’s wellbeing.
Whether it’s on a Zoom chat or a Discord server or a Facebook comments
section; whether it’s on a front lawn or on a phone call or through a letter
conversation; however we come together, we interlace with each other’s
strengths and gifts to build our confidence before God as we live into this
command God has given us: believe in the
name of His Son and love one another. We
are a communal faith, much though it may pain us some days, following after
this brown savior from Palestine Who said blessed are the meek, the weary, the mourning,
the merciful, the peacemakers, the righteous.
Blessed are the ones who love the neighbor, just as we are
commanded. Blessed are the ones who do
not turn away, who do not withhold our breath, as Jesus did not turn away from
us, as Jesus set aside His soul-self.
Blessed are the ones who turn love into a verb.
May we have the patience to listen for
the Spirit’s direction, the courage to follow it, and the love to enter a world
of injustice and see God at work even still.
Amen.
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