Provide: 1 John 5:1-6
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ
has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has
been born of him. 2 By this we know that we love
the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3 For this
is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his
commandments are not burdensome. 4 For everyone
who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has
overcome the world—our faith. 5 Who is it that
overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of
God?
6 This is he who
came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the
water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies,
because the Spirit is the truth. (ESV)
I finally broke down and did my taxes
this week.
Cutting it
close, I know, but I think many of us can understand the “everything else was
more important” method of dealing with the task. This is especially true since it is my first
year filing clergy taxes and clergy taxes in the United States are a special
way of making people question if they really feel called to this
particular vocation.
There are so,
so many rules. There is also a separate
form, it seems, for each rule, and then there’s a form for the exception to the
rule and a line item for declaring why you have an exception to the rule but
only if it falls under these other rules that apply on the third Wednesday of
even-numbered months and are multiplied by 8.47 before being deducted from line
4a.
It makes me
appreciate my accountant friends like never before, let me tell you, and next
year if they offer to do this for me I will not be foolish enough to pass that
up.
But my taxes
are in, my annual tango with the IRS is danced, and I live to work another
round.
Burdensome,
that was.
“And his
commandments are not burdensome,” the writer of 1 John boasts to his audience,
speaking of the pact to keep God’s commandments in the love with which we
respond to being loved. It’s a nice
thought; non-burdensome commandments are the best kind, really, because I for
one have burdens enough from learning tax codes. It ties into a verse etched into the minds of
anyone who’s ever sung Handel’s Messiah:
“His yoke is easy, and His burden”—burthen, for the singers among us—“is
light.”[1]
We continue
the season of Easter in the letter—or sermon—of 1 John and, if you’ve been
keeping score at home, we have been doused in the author’s ideas that God is love
and truly following God means that we love.
Over and over the author grinds in this idea of love at the base of
faith, of life, of anything resembling hope:
we know that a person is in God if they love, we know that we can stand
in front of God with a clean heart if we love, we know God by God’s love. It’s a repetitive little sermon, but then
repetition can be a very effective teacher.
Now we get a
pair of additions to this emphasis on love:
those who love God love those who are born of God and we love God by
keeping God’s commandments.
Cool, cool,
some parameters for what it means to love.
So how do we know who is born of God and what the commandments are? After all, it would be a shame to waste love
on the wrong people or in the wrong circumstance.
The gospel of
Luke was likely written a decade or less before 1 John, but its parable of the
Good Samaritan shines through the lines of these verses.[2] “Who is my neighbor?” asks the legal expert,
and Jesus tells of a person who had no cause to be neighborly at all.[3] This is as an unpacking—a sermon, in its way—of
the shema, the Hebraic recitation of the distillation of the
commandments: love the Lord your God with your whole heart, all your soul, all
your strength, and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
That’s
it. That’s the commandments.
Definitely not
burdensome if it’s just that.
But we, like
the legal expert, know that it’s not just that. What is all my strength? Who is my neighbor? How do I get my whole mind to do anything if
one part of it is always remembering whether or not I turned off the stove? What does it mean to love anything “as
myself”?
So we create
more commandments—we create subcodes, extra forms, labyrinthine requirements of
what it looks like to love, what it means to love, who is allowed to be loved
fully and who only gets that after they shape up a bit. We make the commandments burdensome because
we keep expanding them, a suitcase duct-taped shut because the zipper no longer
closes around the sheer amount of regulations we add so that we won’t get it
wrong.
Because
Christianity, unfortunately, has spent an awful lot of time instilling the fear
that we might get it wrong—and the consequences are dire. So we create rules, and rules upon rules,
because if I know what to do then I can do that, I can have victory over myself.
Funny enough,
though; this encouragement to love has nothing to do with victory over
ourselves. As much as we’ve pushed the
narrative of “victory in Jesus” over our broken and sinful hearts in the 20th
century, the kind of Christianity mentioned here isn’t about a battle with
sin. It’s about our way of being in the
world.
“This is the victory that has
overcome the world—our faith.” That
faith has often been reframed around this idea of victory as a war
scenario: when I do things right, when I
keep all the many sub-commandments, I win.
You might lose, but the important part is that I win. I have victory. The people who are like me—whether they have
the same theological bend or the same language or the same skin tone or the
same sexual orientation as I do, they win, too.
We have victory over the world.
Except that’s in
total opposition to the almost absurd amount of references to love in this
sermon. Love is not something that
swoops in and squashes; as I mentioned last week, love will not dismay,
enslave, or betray you. This language of
victory has to be put into its original context or we, a United Methodist
congregation in 21st century America, will get some really wild
ideas out of it.
Written about
a generation after the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem,[4] 1 John addresses a group
that is now majority Gentile—that is, non-Jewish—and is understandably
frightened by the recent violence of the emperor Domitian against several
minority groups he deemed a threat to the Empire.[5] It was not a wholescale persecution of
Christians as we sometimes like to paint when we look back, but it was a time
of uncertainty and lack of safety. The
sermon of 1 John is calling people to love as a form of victory when there was
no chance of militaristic victory on the horizon and when, in fact, there was a
pretty good chance of failure by any of the standards of the world.
Our faith
is the victory, this says. Our faith as
lived out in love as lived out in the non-burdensome commandments: when we strip this down to its bare
parts—love God, love neighbor, love self—then we are victorious, then we overcome
a world that urges violence, selfishness, and domination.
It is only
when we stop burdening ourselves that we can even think about victory, “for
everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.” Do you claim the God Who claims you? Congratulations, you have overcome the world.
It’s an already-happened kind of thing. You have overcome the systems that
oppress, the empires that crush, the enforcers that kill, the evil that walks
around the world in the guise of power. Oh,
victory in Jesus. What shall you do now?
That’s your
choice; that’s faith in action. Because this
is also an ongoing, not-yet kind of thing; victory that is static doesn’t last,
and to overcome the world is a constant, daily action. Our faith is rebuilt every morning we wake
up, every moment we choose to walk in step with the Christ Who taught us how to
live in love. I know, that’s a lot of
pressure, but it’s not about being constantly aware at all times of every
decision—please don’t do that, you’ll drive yourself mad. It’s about practicing; we practice our faith,
this faith rooted in love, and over time it becomes something we don’t have to
think about as often. It becomes
unburdensome. It becomes natural to love
God; natural to love our neighbor; natural to love ourselves. It becomes a recognition of what love is—and
what it is not. Love is not fixing; love
is not liking; love is not affection.
Affection won’t overcome the world; it isn’t strong enough. Love that puts on its work boots and kicks
down the door of apathy to say that every person who walks this planet as well
as the planet itself was made by God and is therefore worth being treated with
respect—that’s the kind of love that topples empires, that outlasts wars, that
changes us one day at a time, that overcomes the world.
This is what John
Wesley meant when he talked about us being perfected in love: not that we never make a mistake or that we
always do exactly the right thing because we know all the rules, but that we
learn from the moments we fail. We
reexamine what it means to love, to be loved, to have faith and we use what we realize
the next time, getting stronger, overcoming the world that tells us selfishness
is better.[6]
This is what
overcomes the world; this is what overcomes greed, prejudice, violence, and
pride. This is what overcomes our desire
to box ourselves in with laws upon laws; this is what overcomes our fear of
getting it wrong; this is what overcomes our condescension that we got it right
and that other person didn’t; this is what overcomes the world that tells us I
can only have more if you have less.
Faith, rooted in love, following the commandments that are no burden.
“One loves
God’s children by loving God and keeping God’s commandments,” writes Professor
Brian Peterson. “Though it may seem as
though the author is just writing in circles, this is not nonsense. Love for
God and love for God’s children are integrally connected. They both flow from
the belief that God sent the Son for our sake, and one love cannot exist
without the other.
“Although the mention of ‘commandments’
in verse 2 could be taken to mean the moral code of the Torah or more narrowly
the 10 Commandments, there is no focus on the Law in 1 John; in fact, the word ‘Law’
never appears in the Johannine letters. The ‘commandments,’ which the author
does mention frequently, have already been identified as two united concerns:
belief in Jesus as the Son of God, and love for one another (3:23).”[7]
God provides us with everything we
need to practice this faith; we don’t have to add more rules, nor do we have to
tear ourselves apart when we don’t get it completely right. As we Methodists say, we are constantly going
on to perfection—we haven’t gotten there yet.
But we’re still walking, we who have
overcome the world, we who are overcoming the world, we who lean on the Christ
Who died and was resurrected, we who are learning to love with every breath in,
every breath out. And that’s not that
much of a burden, after all.
May we open
ourselves to the Spirit’s guidance, humble ourselves under God’s commandments,
and trust ourselves to Christ’s love.
Amen.
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