Propose: 1 John 4:7-21
Fifth Sunday of Easter
7-10 My beloved friends,
let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who
loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who
refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because
God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God
showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live
through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon
a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear
away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.
11-12 My dear, dear
friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No
one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within
us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!
13-16 This is how we
know we’re living steadily and deeply in him, and he in us: He’s given us life
from his life, from his very own Spirit. Also, we’ve seen for ourselves and
continue to state openly that the Father sent his Son as Savior of the world.
Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God’s Son participates continuously in an
intimate relationship with God. We know it so well, we’ve embraced it heart and
soul, this love that comes from God.
17-18 God is love. When
we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives
in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in
us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is
identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love
banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of
judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.
19 We, though, are going
to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.
20-21 If anyone boasts,
“I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing
of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love
the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God
includes loving people. You’ve got to love both. (MSG paraphrase)
Stephen Spielberg has re-made the
iconic film “West Side Story,” a tale of star-crossed lovers based on the
Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet and set amidst the identity gang
wars of 1950s New York. It’s set to
release in December of this year and, thanks to the trailer, I’ve had the music
of Leonard Bernstein stuck in my head all week.
Even people
who have no patience for musicals often have some idea of “West Side Story;” it
shows up in American high school classrooms with roughly the same regularity as
Romeo and Juliet itself. I’m
curious to see what this adaptation will bring, I admit, but I’ve been thinking
a lot about the love story it professes to be.
For those of
you for whom high school may not have been recent, a brief recap of the musical
is that Maria, the sister of the leader of the Puerto Rican gang the Sharks,
falls in love with Tony, the right-hand man of the leader of the European gang
the Jets. Such a love cannot last and
the show ends, like its Shakespearean model, in tragedy and we culturally nod
along to the depth of such love, such powerful love that tried its best and
maybe began to build some bridges across the deep divides.
Love is one of
the most tossed-around words in the English language; we love everything from a
new rice cooker to our firstborn child.
These are (hopefully) not the same kind of love, but English doesn’t
change its wording.
Greek does.
“Let us
continue to love each other since love comes from God,” writes the preacher of
1 John. He uses agape—four times
in verse seven alone—to talk about the love that is asked. Agape[1]
is the kind of love that can be unconditional, the love that is selfless
and sits underneath our ability to have empathy for complete strangers. It’s the kind of love that is called “the
greatest of these” in 1 Corinthians 13:13, outstripping even faith and hope. It’s a kind of love that takes practice. It’s the kind of love God shows us.
Thankfully,
God does not love us with the consuming passion eros like Maria and Tony;
nor does God love us with the friendly affection of philos as we may
have for our long-time vacation buddies or our siblings. God loves us with agape, with a love
that reaches under the very rhythm of things and grasps hold of the reality
that we, we humans, are loved.
“If God loved
us like this, we certainly ought to love each other.”
Oh, no.
Doesn’t the
preacher know there are annoying people in the world? Doesn’t he know there are annoying people…in church? Can’t we do philos for the people we
like?
Nope. The writer knows full well that loving other
people, especially in community, is hard work.
After all, we are now four chapters into this sermon that is all about
being in relationship with those around us in constructive, healthy, and faithful
ways. The fact that it takes practice
and time is not news. But there is
reassurance; as Professor David Bartlett puts it, “But if understood first as
the God of love, perfect love, then we approach God with confidence. God’s love
is perfect and our love is perfected because we trust in God’s love. ‘We love
because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19).
Note the sentence carefully. It is not ‘we ought to
love because he first loved us’ as if God’s love were the ground for a new
imperative. It is ‘we can love because he first loved us.’
God’s love is the ground for a new possibility.”[2]
How amazing! How wonderful! We are shown the way of love because God
taught it to us. All we have to do is
keep reading the Scriptures, practice that muscle of our heart, dig into the
image of God, the imago Dei that resides in us all, and love. Great.
Except I want
us not to lose the fact, Church, that when we read “God loves us and sent his
Son,” that “us” is everybody.
Everybody.
Including you.
Oh no indeed.
There are so
many people in the Christian faith who will talk for a whole day about the deep
and abiding love of Christ and spend the night feeling utterly unlovable. There are people who accept terrible
friendships or abusive family members because surely, this is a good enough
love, this is what it means to be loved, it is acceptable. There are people who can quote you whole
chunks of Scripture about the enduring love of the Lord and feel, deep deep
down, that none of it applies to them.
I have had
this conversation as a pastor, as a friend, and as a person many, many
times. We are, spiritually speaking,
fantastic at saying a message we have not imbibed for ourselves.
If this isn’t
a problem for you and you know all the time that God loves you and there’s
nothing you can do about that and it’s a source of hope and strength,
awesome. Keep on keepin’ on, sibling,
and practice extending that love to others in your ever-deepening faith. But if this rattles your bars a bit, if this
sounds too familiar, if maybe there’s some truth in the lie that God loves
everyone but I’m not on the list, stay with me.
Breathe deeply.
“The incarnation meant that the
grace, glory, and love of God had been made visible (see 1:1-4),” writes
Professor Brian Peterson. “With the incarnation
no longer visibly available to us (i.e., on this side of Easter), the author
points to the love of the church as the place where God’s own love may be
seen. God’s loving intent is completed (‘perfected’ in verses 12 and 17)
only when that love is lived out in relation to the rest of the church. For
those who look for some demonstration of the reality of God and of the gospel,
the church should be able to point to its mutual love and say, ‘come and see.’”[3]
It is still the season of Easter, the
celebration of Jesus the Christ having experienced the fullness of death and
said nope, this is not where this ends.
The many appearances after Jesus’ resurrection are in service of
continuing to tell people just as He had before the crucifixion that you are
loved, you are wanted here, you matter to God, you are part of building the
Kingdom, you are called to love and be loved.
This faith system has, at its core, the opportunity to keep telling that
story, to keep speaking that reassurance:
you are loved, you are wanted here, you matter to
God. This faith community, whether it’s
here in the building of St. Luke’s or on a Zoom call of a small group or on the
front lawn with the prayer party or in a moment of hanging out together, this is
our training ground to hear again and again that this is how God loves us, this
is what it looks like, this is the way we—you and I—are loved, from which we
can love others. It is the kind of love
that proposes not “good enough” but “wonderful,” not “acceptable” but
“all-encompassing,” not tolerance but agape, not fear but formation.
“There is no room for love in fear,”
says verse 18; “well-formed love banishes fear,” a verse more commonly
memorized as “perfect love casts out fear.”
So if we are fearful, do we not love?
Are we not loved, which then is frightening and we begin all over
again? No; Professor Alicia Myers
reassures us that such a declaration “should not be read as a condemnation of
the one who experiences fear. We all feel fear at various times in our lives,
and various biblical passages even encourage a certain type of ‘fear’: fear of
the Lord (Proverbs 1:7). Instead, 1 John 4:18 works with the rest of the sermon
to encourage the audience that God, whose love is demonstrated to perfection by
Jesus (and his disciples), is casting out fear, and creating a time
when all might experience confidence rather than shame (see also 1 John
2:28-29).
“After all, when we spend our lives
loving in the same way that Jesus loved, we do not focus on condemning others
(or even ourselves) for experiencing fear. Rather, we focus on loving people
through those fears and thereby revealing the true victory of God, the One who
is Love, in spite of the chaos around us.”[4]
We love because we have been taught
to love. We move beyond fear because we
have been taught to move. We refuse to
settle for less than the awareness of ourselves and those around us as God’s
beloved creations because we are taught to listen for the voice of the Spirit
Who calls us by name.
There’s a song by the band Mumford
& Sons that has been running in my head alongside “West Side Story” this
week called “Sigh No More.” The chorus
runs, “Love, it will not betray you / dismay or enslave you; / it will set you
free / to be more like the man / you were made to be.”[5] “If God loved us like this, we certainly
ought to love one another.”
So I propose an examination. Look at the love in your life, beloved. Does it betray you? It is not love. Does it dismay you? It is not love. Does it imprison you? It is not love. Does it empower you to love others even when
they are frustrating? That is
love. Does it remind you that you are
worth every day that you spend on this planet?
That is love. Does it put
you back together when you break apart so you can become the human God sees in
you? That is love.
Do not fear it, though it may seem
impossible. That love is for you, given
freely, offered from your first breath.
And then, ought we not love one another?
Most certainly we ought. “The command we have from Christ is blunt:
loving God includes loving people.
You’ve got to love both.”
As God loves us; as God loves you;
as God loves me, even on the days I can catalogue every reason He really shouldn’t,
let us learn to love God, ourselves, our neighbors.
After all, as the great love stories
tell us, it’s the thing that will change the world.
May our hearts be softened by the
Spirit and Her perseverance, our souls stretched by the Son and His courage,
and our minds focused on the God Who made us, complex and strange and beloved
as we are. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment